What I Wore to Work Today: Wednesday, September 19, 2012Dress: Goodwill, refashionedCardigan:TargetDress: Xi, came with a blouseShoes: Target

My 2-bedroom apartment has four closets: a small walk-in master bedroom closet, tiny hall closet, and two sliding-door closets in my sewing room. Currently my dresses are lined up together in a spectrum, with the swim cover-up at one end and my pretty-much-only-at-the-office dresses at the other. This leads to some muddled thinking in the middle.

The last documentation of this dress at the office was July 2011. I have a vague memory of feeling like it was too short for work, although it’d be great for all those theoretical cocktail parties that happen only in my mind.

This week I looked at it and said “If it’s not appropriate for work why is it next to the other work dresses, maybe I’m remembering it incorrectly?” The picture looks fine, and it wasn’t a disaster, and it is to short for me to feel comfortable in the office, especially in the back.

Instead of relying on my own memory, I’m going to physically separate the office-ready dresses from the rest. I haven’t decided how to do this exactly — I do like seeing all of them at the same time when selecting attire for non-work occasions. I also like thinking about the different ways I could do it. Organization is fun!

After I wear a skirt I hang it up on the far right side so that I can keep track of when I’m wearing something and try to mix it up a little if I’m repeating too much. Tops don’t receive the same treatment for two reasons: 1) shirts usually get washed after each wearing while skirts can be taken out a few times first, and 2) they’re arranged by color.

Aren’t your skirts arranged more or less by color? I mean, look at that! you say. Nope, that was entirely accidental. My skirts self-selected into warm and cool tones over time.

And it’s done! I finished my sewing room today, the last day of the 28 Day Organizing Challenge. The way it actually went down is that I finished because it’s the last day of the Challenge, and would have kept doing various things if there were more time. I like the results. As my boyfriend said tonight when he helped me move out an old dresser: “There’s a floor in here? Huh, I hadn’t realized that…” And now for the pictures! They’re linked to slightly larger versions if you want to see more detail. The Before pictures are on the left and the After versions are on the right. Answers to the Challenge questionnaire are after the photos.

I also have a few pictures that don’t have Before shots for the comparison; they show my new bulletin board and sewing table accessories.

1. What was the hardest part of the challenge for you and were you able to overcome it? The hardest parts of this challenge were emotional and mental rather than logistical. One of the hardest parts was just walking into the room to work on it. I’d be sitting on my laptop in the living room, reading the various internetz, and I’d say to myself, “Go work in your sewing room! You know you’ll like it!” Usually I didn’t do it. Whenever I finally did I was always glad, and tried to remember the feeling to encourage me to go the next time. I didn’t successfully overcome this difficulty.

Another hard part was throwing away stuff that could maybe possibly be used in a theoretical future project perhaps. I didn’t like feeling wasteful, or like I was adding more garbage to the landfill. I overcame that by using a critical eye to realize that it was mostly garbage and didn’t deserve to be in a project.

One last part that caused me trouble was when I would open a box of papers, notebooks, and pictures and find myself reliving years gone by. For example, I came across my journal from freshman year of college and when I opened it just to find a date to know where to put it, I got sucked into reading about falling in love with my best friend a semester before we got together. (He broke up with me a year later, and we stopped occasionally seeing one another a year and a half after that.) I decided I wasn’t prepared during this particular project timeline to delve that deeply into the emotional aspect of purging and organizing decade-old papers, so I grouped such items together by category knowing that at a later date I will go back and select which letters/notebooks/pictures/etc I want to actually keep and which can be reminisced about and then tossed. In the meantime, I simply organized these items into storage, purging some that were clearly trash.

2. Tell us what kind of changes/habits you have put into place in order for your area/room to maintain its new order? I added a small cutting table in place of the dresser to minimize the amount of in-progress fabric and projects that I used to work on the floor and to make to it difficult to stuff things away in a closed drawer and forget about them. There are now two small trash cans, one within reach of each main station in my sewing room. The large plastic bins in the closet are stacked with the least-used one on the bottom.

3. What did you do with the “stuff” you were able to purge out of your newly organized space? A lot went into the garbage. The dresser moved to the guest room, lots of boxes of keepsakes were consolidated into much fewer boxes and stored in the spare room closet until I go through the papers individually to purge ones I don’t want to keep (see question 1 above), and some items moved to more appropriate permanent homes in other parts of the house.

4. What creative storage solutions were you able to introduce in order to create additional space as well as establish some limits and boundaries?
By consolidating multiple containers and boxes that weren’t even half-filled, I opened up more storage space. Other than that, I didn’t use a lot of creativity, it was more that I took the time to put things where I already knew they belonged.

5. Why do you think you should win this challenge? I’m not convinced I should win it, although that’s hard to say without seeing all the other participants’ results. Despite the mess, my sewing room has always had the bones of good organizational structure. The Before and After shots aren’t extreme, and I didn’t so much implement many new organizing systems as I did enforce the existing ideas. Also, I still have a few cardboard boxes of items to thoroughly sort and purge at a later date — notebooks, papers, folders, pictures, letters, notes,… They’re no longer in my sewing room, although they’re still out there.

Update #1:

I do plan to mount the thread holder on the wall above my sewing table after I buy some nails. Apparently we don’t have any nails, not even in the junk drawer. A complete tool set, yes. Screws, yes. Pushpins, yes. Nails, no. Wait, maybe I could use some of those heavy-duty removable poster-mounting squares I found in a drawer and carefully collected together to put with other office supplies. Hm…

The left side of the closet is in fact prom dresses, cocktail dresses, and vintage gowns from the ’60s handed down from my mom. Other costumes and nostalgia-wear are in the bottom tub on the closet floor. The hanging dividers contain fancy shoes and purses. The clothes on the right side are waiting for alterations, tailoring, and refashions. Actual everyday clothes don’t live in my sewing room.

The plastic basket on my sewing table corrals sewing tools like scissors, seam ripper, and pins, as well as some basic office supplies like tape, pens, and a scratch pad. I put a pretty note card box in the bottom of one half to raise the level enough so that the smaller items didn’t disappear in the bottom. It will also be able to store items when I find the need. It’s still empty as of yet because as I’ve learned, just because I have a container doesn’t mean I should put something in it. Let the contents determine the container and not vice versa.

I bought myself a thread holder at Joann a couple weeks ago. I decided it was time: my spools had outgrown the two plastic sandwich containers I’d been using, and I really like lining things up in order. Organizers were on sale for half off, so I bought the larger one to give me room to grow. Right now it stands on the corner of my sewing table, although at some point it will move up to the wall to clear surface space.

Having all the spools lined up makes it easy to see what to buy next time. I need light blue, which I’ve forgotten to buy twice now because I didn’t write it down, and I just finished a spool of gray.

I have decided to share the Before pictures I just took of my sewing room, with the theory being that I will post After pictures within a couple months. It’s gotten so bad that while working on the zigzag baby quilt, I’m really only using my sewing room when I’m sitting at the sewing machine itself. Everything else — cutting, pressing, arranging, pinning, etc. — I’ve been doing in the spare room next door. I have acknowledged the depths of the problem, I have motivation from within to change. The process begins today.

If anybody would like to share Before pictures of their own sewing room or other space clearly in need of some attention, I’ll link to you. Maybe it’s as small as a junk drawer or as large as a three-car garage, I know you have your own disaster area. Let’s organize them before the end of the year. We can call it the Great Space Clean-up of 2009. Who’s in?

Some things to note:

The first picture shows part of my current zigzag baby quilt.

There are over half a dozen unpacked boxes sitting around. We moved into the house 11 months ago.

The dresser is still wrapped in the plastic the movers used to hold in all the drawers. Again, we moved into the house 11 months ago.

Does the crumpled paper bag of gift wrapping supplies really need to be in my sewing room? And could the supplies maybe be kept together by something other than a crumpled paper grocery bag?

The closet doors are open because there’s too much stuff in the way to close them.

The bottom two pictures show quite a few clear plastic bins and drawers. In theory, these can be used to hold things other than slightly smaller clear plastic bins.

The window had blinds at one point. They fell on me one day around Christmas when I pulled on the string to open them. They have been leaning against the window ever since.

I regularly vacuum the patch of open floor space, especially before laying any fabric on it. The patch keeps getting smaller. I pretend not to notice.